Factorio Developer Discusses Optimizations Used

It’s really nice to see that the solutions they use are really simple.<p>It seems like no tricky optimizations or complex algorithms, they just tick everything active every frame. The key is that they don’t tick things they don’t have to, and don’t render off-screen sprites, so “ticking” an entity is updating a tiny datastructure and maybe a few other datastructures it points to.

Factorio is interesting because it is a deterministic simulation of all the entities (this is how multiplayer works; they&#x27;re all running the same simulation and only passing &quot;commands&quot;).<p>RAM speed is often the limiting &quot;factor&quot;(io) as to how fast the simulation can run or how large you can build.